'What would Gabby want?'

TUCSON, Ariz. — On Monday, when Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’s breakfast was delivered to her Houston hospital room, she asked for something else: toast.

It might not seem like much, but one month after a failed assassin fired a bullet into her brain, such seemingly small milestones in her long recovery have helped sustain Giffords’s inner circle — family, friends and aides — as they cope with last month’s Tucson massacre by sharing in her progress and continuing to serve her constituents. Giffords is now eating three meals a day — as her husband, Mark Kelly, announced Tuesday on Facebook — and as she did Monday, speaking is the latest sign of progress.

Story Continued Below

Over the past month, her aides have been forced into one of the worst crisis management tests ever faced by a congressional office.

It’s hard to imagine any small staff dealing with such a sprawling, massive and sustained ordeal — and the staffers have done it in the absence of their leader and three of their colleagues, one of whom was killed and two of whom have not returned to work since being shot. (See: Intern gets back to work in Arizona)

Even the outpouring of support can be a logistical nightmare: Giffords’s district office has logged nearly 20,000 contacts in the month since the rampage.

They deal with these challenges by answering the oft-repeated question: “What would Gabby want?”

At the center of the entire Giffords operation is her 30-year-old chief of staff, Pia Carusone, who has been running Giffords’s Tucson and Washington offices from spartan side rooms at Houston’s TIRR Memorial Hermann hospital with her BlackBerry, a Mac computer and a tiny, 3-by-5-inch reporter’s notebook containing four weeks’ worth of daily to-do lists. She cadged the notebook from an FBI agent in Arizona when she realized she needed to keep track of all her tasks. (See: Recovering, Giffords speaks)

It travels with her, as do a black-and-white lapel ribbon and three bracelets — a white one bearing the date of the shootings; a blue one with a heart symbol, a peace sign and the name “Gabby”; and a red one that keeps her curls under control when it’s not clinging to her wrist.

Carusone was at home in Washington on Jan. 8 when an aide called to tell her there had been a shooting. A second aide confirmed that Gabe Zimmerman, Giffords’s outreach director, had been killed and that the congresswoman had been shot in the head. Carusone called Kelly and packed a bag with all the wrong clothes — save for the black suit she would wear to three funerals.

“All I thought was, I might be going to a funeral,” she said in an interview with POLITICO in Houston on Monday. She’s been buying clothes as necessary ever since, having spent just five hours at home in Washington since the shootings.

She contacted the White House, a handful of congressional colleagues and the House sergeant-at-arms. Within minutes, her phone was flooded with so many calls that she couldn’t dial out. (See: Echoes of Tucson on the House floor)

Before she got to Tucson, she had to push back on erroneous reports that Giffords was dead. Carusone had just spoken with Giffords’s mother when the news broke. It wasn’t true.

“This is inaccurate. She is in surgery,” she wrote in an e-mail message that she copied, pasted and sent to members of the media.